[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 28 (Thursday, February 16, 2017)]
[House]
[Pages H1289-H1292]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
DISMANTLING THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Johnson of Louisiana). Under the
Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2017, the gentleman from
Maryland (Mr. Raskin) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of
the minority leader.
Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to be with you this
afternoon. I have a series of other speakers who will be joining me
later in the hour from the Progressive Caucus, as we discuss some of
the key events of the week from our perspective.
General Leave
Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all the Members
have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and include
extraneous material on the subject of my Special Order.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the
gentleman from Maryland?
There was no objection.
Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I love magic, and I bet a lot of people out
there watching today love magic, too. Ever since I was a kid, I loved
the cup tricks, the card tricks, and the rabbit coming out of the hat.
When I was in college, I even used to entertain at elementary school
birthday parties, helping to pay my way through college.
The key move in magic, as you know, Mr. Speaker, is the sleight of
hand. I looked up the definition of ``sleight of hand'' in the Merriam-
Webster Dictionary, which defines it as a cleverly executed deception.
A sleight of hand is also sometimes called a prestidigitation, quick
fingers, or legerete de la main, which is the French phrase for
``lightness of hand.'' It is defined as the set of closely related
techniques used by a stage magician to manipulate the perceptions of
the audience.
Sleight of hand depends on the use of psychology, careful stage
misdirection, constant blabbering, and strategic confusion to distract
the audience.
Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States has been masterfully
deploying sleight of hand ever since his inauguration. With his nonstop
tweeting and his incessant mad antics, the President distracts us from
the real action, which is what is happening here in Congress. We are
witnessing a magic trick on the world's largest stage, the auditorium
of American democracy. And we, the people, are the captive, bedazzled,
and totally distracted audience of the President. The tweets are a
massive sleight of hand distracting us from the serious destruction of
public policy and law that is taking place right here in Congress.
[[Page H1290]]
{time} 1700
I want to say, at the outset, I prefer to think of this as a magic
trick because the alternative that the President simply can't control
himself is almost too horrific to contemplate.
The Constitution does have a way of dealing with that problem, too,
and you can find it in the 25th Amendment.
Today, we are going to assume that all of this is a magic show. I
used to coach kids' soccer. And when I coached soccer, I would always
tell the kids: Don't bunch. Keep your eye on the ball. Stay in your
lane and pass the ball.
Without fail, the youngest kids who are just starting out, they all
chase the ball. They move around the field in a big clump, a big mob.
And I would say: Don't follow the mob that is following the ball. Go to
where the ball is going to be going.
When they are young, they don't know how to do it.
I think that advice applies here as well to America, to the body
politic. Don't follow the mob that is following the ball. Let's not be
distracted full time by all the tomfoolery and tweetfoolery.
There are important and dangerous things happening right here in
Congress right now. While the President is tweeting insults and fake
news and inflating his slender college victory and the size of his
inaugural crowd and making fun of Meryl Streep and chatting about
Nordstrom's department store and talking about how he is going to make
Mexico pay for his wall and so on, what is taking place in Congress is
the systematic dismantling of the regulatory apparatus that the
American public depends on for clean air, clean water, safe food, a
decent environment, and control of criminality in the country.
The fundamental political action that we must be paying attention to
now is the dismantling of the regulatory apparatus of the Federal
Government, which is happening every day right here in the Halls of
Congress. This is the apparatus that protects our food, our air, our
water, our health care, our financial system, the ability of people to
invest safely on Wall Street, occupational safety and health for our
workers. All of this is being attacked in terrifying and often
invisible ways.
Behind the scenes, while the wizard of odd convenes a dinner in Mar-
a-Lago where he entertains a national security crisis discussion in
full view of other diners who begin to tweet out and Facebook out what
they are seeing happen, while all of that is happening, Congress is
rolling back environmental protections to protect streams, rivers, and
drinking water from pollution. They are savaging the rules that
restrict the volume of greenhouse gas emissions that are leaked into
the atmosphere, destabilizing our climate system. Check out H.J. Res.
38 and 36.
While the distractor in chief whines about leaks, while his whole
campaign was based on leaks of emails that were captured by Russian
agents working to get him elected, in Congress, they are rolling back
financial regulations which ensure that workers have retirement savings
options, H.J. Res. 66, and which protect consumers from excessive
financial risks, H.R. 78.
They have also targeted and rolled back labor regulations that
promote safe and healthy workplaces and fair employment practices, H.J.
Res. 37.
Amazingly, while President Trump's National Security Adviser, General
Flynn, was forced to resign when it was revealed that he had been
colluding with Russians to lift the sanctions that the Obama
administration had imposed on Russia, here in Congress, we are passing
joint resolutions to rescind anticorruption regulations that required
oil and gas companies to report monetary payments that they made to
foreign governments, H.J. Res. 41.
So Trump tweets about leaks, while his administration is one vast
leak to the Russians. And here, Members of the GOP are working to throw
an invisibility and secrecy cloak over corporate payments being made to
foreign governments and corporations.
While the world is distracted by all of the sleight of hand, this
Congress is passing bills to give government back to giant corporations
and special interests that care not for the common good but simply for
their own bottom line.
Mr. Speaker, as a freshman, I have been here for only 8 weeks. I have
to tell you that I am disappointed that I have not voted on a single
bill in the House Judiciary Committee that has had so much as a
hearing. Yes, I want to repeat that. We have voted on five bills since
I got here and not one of them has had a hearing.
Now, I come from the Maryland State Senate where I proudly served for
10 years as a State senator. When we had a bill coming up, no bill
could be brought to the floor without a hearing first, and anybody who
wanted to come testify on the bill could come testify on it. Now, that
is not practicable here in the U.S. Congress. However, we could at
least have experts relating to the bill and people who are affected by
the bill come in and testify, but we haven't done that in the House
Judiciary Committee. Instead, we voted on a series of bills which, to
my mind, dramatically curtail the public interest.
Yesterday, we voted on a bill to dismantle, essentially to put into a
stifling straightjacket, the class-action mechanism that has been used
over the decades to vindicate the interest of people who are victims of
sex discrimination, victims of race discrimination, victims of toxic
torts, victims of asbestos poisoning. We voted basically to trash class
action yesterday without even so much as a bill.
Now, on some of the other bills, it was said to me: Well, there were
hearings in prior Congresses. One Member said: We had a hearing on that
back in 2012.
This is 2017, 5 years later. But on this particular bill that I am
talking about, nobody even heard the bill. There was no hearing on it.
It was simply brought up for a vote. That is irresponsible legislation.
That is not real democracy when you don't even have a hearing and
people who are affected by the legislation don't have the opportunity
to come and talk about it.
Now, they are not having hearings because they think--and they are
probably right--we're not paying attention. What are we paying
attention to? We are paying attention to the magician. We are paying
attention to the wizard of odd. We are paying attention to the tweets
instead.
The good news is that the audience is starting to wise up. The whole
country is waking up to the profound dangers of the administration's
financial and political entanglements with Russia, with the Russian
corporate and governmental elite.
Just this week, the National Security Adviser, Mr. Flynn, resigned
after reports came out about his communications with the Russian
Ambassador while President Obama was still in office, communications
dealing with the lifting of sanctions on Russia, communications that
General Flynn lied about and was forced from office because of it. He
misled Vice President Mike Pence and other officials about his
conversations with the diplomat, which was being monitored and recorded
by the intelligence community.
Now, Mr. Speaker, ladies and gentlemen, my fellow Americans, let's
think about this for a moment. As a former chief of the Defense
Intelligence Agency, Mr. Flynn was no innocent about the world of spy
versus spy. He must have known that his telephone call with the Russian
Ambassador was being monitored and recorded. If he really wanted to go
rogue and operate on his own without the permission and the license of
President Trump, he never would have allowed that telephone
conversation to be recorded. But he did allow it to be recorded. He
made the call with presumable full knowledge that other people in the
intelligence community would be listening in on it, which leads me to
the inescapable, logical conclusion that Flynn knew that, in making
that call, he enjoyed the full support of the one person above him who
could remove him from his job, the President of the United States.
Now, do I know that? No, I don't know it. I surmise it. How are we
going to know whether or not this is true? How do we get to the bottom
of the Russian connection in the campaign? How do we get to the bottom
of the Russian connection in the Trump administration?
We need to have a full, complete, independent investigation by
experts, like the 9/11 Commission, which gets to the bottom of this
profound danger, this dagger pointed at the throat of American
democracy.
[[Page H1291]]
Mr. Speaker, everybody loves magic, I think. Everybody loves the
enchantment of being fooled, of being distracted, of being diverted.
That is why people go to magic shows. It is diverting. It is amusing.
It is fun.
Everybody loves a great magician, too. None was greater in our
history than the great Houdini, who dazzled the world with his
extraordinary optical illusions and effects, his amazing ability to
simulate telepathy and telekinesis.
Houdini also had a very strong ethical and professional code about
being a magician. He never revealed a trick. More importantly, he never
tried to fool people in order to defraud them. He never tried to fool
people in order to humiliate them. He never tried to fool people in
order to take away their rights. He never tried to fool people in order
to demoralize and crush them or to strip them of their freedom. He
never tried to fool people in order to victimize them.
Indeed, in the 1920s, Mr. Houdini channeled all of his magnificent
energy away from doing his magic shows and instead put it into the
separate but related task of exposing psychics, mediums, con men,
charlatans, and practitioners of the occult and the dark arts who did
take advantage of people's good will, who did take advantage of
people's impressionability to defraud them, to take their money, their
belongings, and to distract them from the real world, and to undermine
the moral and ethical principles that should govern human behavior and
must govern social life.
Although Houdini is no longer with us, he has great heirs today in
socially responsible magicians like the Amazing Randi and Penn &
Teller.
Already millions of Americans themselves--millions of us in the
audience--have woken up to the fact that we have been pulled into an
irrational and dangerous fantasy world, an echo chamber of malignant
narcissism, cruelty, and paranoia.
It is time for all of us to stop being distracted, to stop being
bedazzled, and pay attention to the real game, which is, one, trying to
get America to join with Vladimir Putin, a dictator and an autocrat who
said that the single greatest catastrophe of the 20th century was the
dissolution of the Soviet Union, in order to create an international
league of dictators, demagogues, and despots to violate human rights
and crush liberal democracy; and, two, to dismantle at home the public
regulatory infrastructure which protects our land, our air, our water,
our climate, our liberties, our freedoms, our equal rights, and our
capacity to function as the greatest democracy on Earth and to function
as an efficient and effective government meeting the needs of the
people.
The magicians out there--there aren't many--but you have a special
obligation to help us blow the whistle, and you are doing it. But it is
really the American people--it is all of us who must stand up.
The Constitution talks about three branches of government. Article I
is Congress. Article II is the executive. Article III is the judiciary.
Let's call Congress the first branch.
But when you think about it, what is even more important than the
Congress is the trunk, the roots of democracy. Everything grows up from
the people. The branches are out there, but Congress works for the
people. The President works for Congress and the people. The Supreme
Court and the judiciary work for the people.
It is time for the people to dissolve the spells that have been cast
over the country, to say this is a democracy. We operate by the
Constitution and the rule of law.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to the distinguished gentlewoman from Illinois
(Ms. Schakowsky).
Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. Mr. Speaker, I really appreciate participating in
this Special Order hour about things that, I think, the American people
really ought to be caring about.
The minute that Donald Trump took the oath of office and put his hand
in the air, he was in violation of the law. It is just a fact that the
Trump Hotel, which is in the old post office building--there is a very
explicit contract that says no elected official may enter into a
contract for that hotel and profit from the business in that hotel.
There was a lawsuit that was filed. It is still pending.
You may not think that is a really big deal, but how about this: What
if there were delegations from somewhere else in the world, some
country that really wanted to curry favor with the United States of
America, and decided a really good way to do it would be to move our
delegation to stay at the Trump Hotel?
{time} 1715
Maybe we could have a big gala, we could have a party, and we could
make a lot of money from that. And guess what. Maybe the President of
the United States would notice that we are spending money in a hotel
from which he gains a profit, and that would be a really swell idea.
Well, actually, the Framers of the Constitution thought that was not
such a grand idea and very explicitly put into the Constitution
something that would prohibit any foreign government from influencing
U.S. policy. They were worried about the King of England. They were
worried about France. They were worried about other countries having
too much influence on the United States by currying favor with the
President and the decisionmakers, and so they introduced and put into
the Constitution very explicitly what they called the Emoluments Clause
in Article I, section 9 of the Constitution.
While ``emoluments'' is certainly not a word we use in regular
conversations--emoluments, I never used it before this and never heard
of it before this, actually--it is a concept that is part of our
Constitution, and it is very simple: that no government official should
receive benefits of any kind--of any kind--from a foreign government.
President Trump is clearly violating that constitutional principle.
So, unlike any Presidents before him, President Trump has actually
refused to fully separate himself and his family from his business
dealings. It is also very unusual, of course, that we haven't seen his
tax returns, which has been pretty standard for any President to
release his tax returns, and it has been a requirement for the Cabinet
that Mr. Trump has exacted from those nominees.
Because of his business holdings, Trump and his family are
constantly--constantly--receiving benefits from other countries,
whether it is foreign governments renting that space at the Trump Hotel
in D.C. or the loans and business agreements that the Trump
organization has with China, Russia, and many other countries. We don't
know them all. We haven't seen them all. That would be in his tax
returns and all the different sections of the tax return, his holdings
in Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, which he has refused to put into a blind
trust.
So it is troubling enough that President Trump and his family are
profiting off the Presidency, but now it is becoming clearer that this
lack of ethics could threaten our national security and national
interests. So if you haven't cared until now, you ought to start
caring.
Look at Russia. Trump has done business in Russia and has remained
uncomfortably close to Vladimir Putin. He refuses to release his tax
returns, which could clarify the specific financial interests that he
has in Russia.
President Trump knew his National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn,
was compromised by Russian intelligence and had misled Vice President
Pence; yet Flynn was allowed to remain in one of our most sensitive
national security positions until criticism from Congress, the media,
and the public became too much to ignore.
President Trump continues to gloss over the serious problems that led
to Flynn's resignation. Instead, he attacks the messenger and the leaks
that brought Flynn's conduct to light. These are bright red flags.
These are signs that the President has something to hide.
Americans deserve a President who they can trust is putting the
country's interests ahead of his own, that he is putting the country's
interests instead of another country's interests because that deal
might be in his interest.
There should be no question over the purity of the President's
motives, especially when he is making critical security decisions on
behalf of the Nation. If President Trump wants to assure the American
people that he deserves our
[[Page H1292]]
trust, he must be transparent. We need a bipartisan, independent
investigation of his conflicts of interest, particularly with Russia,
but not exclusively. He must release his tax returns, and he must fully
separate himself from his business dealings.
The corrupt practices of this administration must stop. Our country
and our Constitution demand nothing less.
Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from South Carolina
(Mr. Clyburn), my good friend, the Assistant Democratic Leader.
Honoring Voorhees College and Denmark Technical College
Mr. CLYBURN. Mr. Speaker, I rise to continue honoring HBCUs,
Historically Black Colleges and Universities, for their significant
contributions to our Nation's history.
While only 3 percent of our Nation's higher education institutions
are Historically Black, HBCUs produce 20 percent of the African-
American college graduates. Today, I recognize and celebrate two of the
seven HBCUs in my congressional district, Voorhees College and Denmark
Technical College, both in Denmark, South Carolina.
Voorhees College was founded as Denmark Industrial School in 1897 by
Elizabeth Evelyn Wright when she was just 23 years old. Wright studied
at Tuskegee Institute and was a devotee of Booker T. Washington. She
had previously led efforts to start schools for African Americans in
South Carolina, which were always met with arson and threats of
violence. She persisted in her efforts to offer African Americans an
opportunity for a better life and, with Voorhees, created an
institution that would stand the test of time.
Wright originally taught classes in an old store in Denmark, but, in
1902, New Jersey philanthropist Ralph Voorhees donated money to
purchase land and construct a building for the school. A high school at
first, Voorhees offered classes at this level for African Americans in
the area.
In 1924, the Episcopal Church partnered with Voorhees, and an
affiliation with that church continues to this day. The college began
to offer junior college degrees in 1947 and 4-year degrees in 1962.
While originally founded on the principles of Booker T. Washington to
teach job and trade skills to African Americans, Voorhees now proudly
claims to offer a blend of Washington's philosophy and that of W. E. B.
Du Bois, who believed a classical liberal arts education was vital to
the development of African Americans.
The college's recently retired president, Dr. Cleveland Sellers, is a
Denmark native who graduated from Voorhees High School. Sellers went on
to Howard University, where he became active with the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, participating in its 1966 March
against Fear.
In 1968, after returning to South Carolina, Sellers was arrested and
imprisoned for supposedly inciting the confrontation between students
and police that became known as the Orangeburg massacre, when police
opened fire on students, killing 3 and injuring 27.
Voorhees' College's new president, Dr. W. Franklin Evans, previously
served as interim president of my alma mater, South Carolina State. In
that role, he successfully led South Carolina State out of a financial
crisis. I sincerely believe that Voorhees College is well-positioned
for the future with Dr. Evans at its helm.
Denmark Technical College, whose campus is adjacent to Voorhees, was
originally a branch of the South Carolina Trade School System. It was
created in 1948 by the South Carolina General Assembly and mandated to
provide trade skills to African Americans. During the ``separate but
equal'' era, Denmark Tech was one of the few opportunities for trade
school education offered to African Americans by the State.
In the early 1960s, Governor Fritz Hollings and then-Senator John
West led the effort to create the South Carolina Technical College
System. In 1969, the existing trade school in Denmark was transferred
into the system and the modern Denmark Technical College was created.
Its total enrollment is approximately 2,000, 96 percent of whom are
minority students. Denmark Tech continues to provide technical
education and trade skills in its assigned region of Bamberg, Barnwell,
and Allendale Counties.
Voorhees College and Denmark Technical College, like their fellow
HBCUs, have made an indelible impact on their communities, South
Carolina, and the Nation. They have provided generations of African
Americans educational opportunities, and I look forward to their
continued success.
Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, we should be joined momentarily by
Representative Sheila Jackson Lee. I want to close out, though, my own
thoughts by responding to something I have been hearing over the last
week here in the Halls of Congress.
Now that it is clear from our intelligence agencies, 16 of them,
including the CIA, the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the
National Security Agency, and so on, that Vladimir Putin had a
deliberate campaign of espionage, cyber sabotage, propaganda, and fake
news to undermine American democracy in the 2016 election, and now that
it is clear that there were high-level contacts between Trump
associates and officials of the Russian Government, it is no longer
being denied by anybody on either side of the aisle. What I have
started to hear is, well, sure, they tried to hack our election, and,
sure, they leaked thousands of emails, and, sure, they changed the
dynamics of the campaign and what people were talking about in the
campaign, but there is no proof that they stuffed any ballot boxes or
they hacked into the computers. And that is true; we don't know that
they stuffed any ballot boxes or hacked into computers, and we will
have to see if anything comes out about that when we finally get to do
a real comprehensive investigation. But, Mr. Speaker, the reality is
that we should be terrified and appalled and outraged that they were
allowed to go as far as they did.
How many people in this body would accept a foreign entity coming
into our congressional districts and spending millions or hundreds of
thousands of dollars against us, hacking into our computers, releasing
our emails, and completely changing the dynamics of the campaign?
So when I hear from colleagues that, well, yes, they distorted the
campaign, they hacked into the campaign, but they didn't steal the
election, I think that they are making a distinction with no difference
at all. If you derail the campaign, you kidnap the campaign, you hijack
the campaign, you have altered the outcome of the election, especially
one in which your opponent gets 2.9 million votes more than you did,
especially in an election where you were able to torture out only the
slenderest of electoral college victories in three States by 70,000
votes.
{time} 1730
So I simply reject the constant claim that I am hearing from
colleagues, Mr. Speaker, that we don't need to worry about Russian
subversion of the 2016 election because it only affected the campaign;
it didn't necessarily affect the election outcome. To influence the
campaign is to influence the election outcome.
Mr. Speaker, I am seeing Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee is not
here, so I yield back the balance of my time.
____________________